sprotty - Graphical Views For Web Applications

Imagine you could navigate through your data graphically directly in the web browser. Imagine you could easily equip your web application with visualisations of complex relationships. Imagine a graphical modeling tool in the web.

In this talk we are going to present sprotty, a new open-source framework to create graphical views for web applications. sprotty combines modern visuals with smooth animations and a pleasant user-experience. Thanks to its lean JSON-based client/server protocol, sprotty is a perfect fit for the graphical part in products that leverage the Language Server Protocol, like Theia or Che.

sprotty implements a uni-directional event flow and uses a virtual DOM. As opposed to the traditional model-view-controler approach, this avoids the typical event feedback loops and yields much better testability.

Apart from that, sprotty is very flexible: Execute it in a web page, a Node.js application or even in the Eclipse browser. Leverage the Eclipse Layout Kernel (ELK) to arrange your graphs in a nice way. Customize every single aspect of your application by means of dependency injection. Visualize any kind of model, including EMF and Xtext.